Bob Lobel: Being Bobby Valentine

I'm here to set the record straight about the most misunderstood guy I know. Me.

I know what your thinking. I know you've already made up your mind that this season can’t be over fast enough so I can get fired. Well, guess what? I kinda feel the same way. No, I really do.

The people I work for think I don’t know what I do know but I do know what they know. That’s a simple way of saying, they have to pay me for all the mistakes everyone around me made all season long, going way back to spring training.

From the very start, this team could do nothing right. They moved Daniel Bard out of the bullpen and made me use him as a starter. How did that turn out?

Now he is back with my team in the bullpen so I can experiment with him during the final weeks for the next guy that has to manage these dolts.

They asked me to change the culture around this miserable place that had such a miserable season, and guess what? I changed it. For instance, that guy that used to play third base, Youkalis? Gone. I was told he was not a popular guy so to show the rest of the team I was on their side, I got him out of town.

And what happens? The team turns on me and defends him.. Then the guy comes back here and has a career four games, hitting for the cycle if you put two of the four games together. What has he done since? Nobody around here cares.

Let me tell you, this is a strange place. They still do "the wave," they sing this Neil Diamond song, win or lose, usually lose, in the eighth inning and boo their players from time to time. A lot! Especially one of the ace starting pitchers that sucked all year for me when I was told they were ace pitchers.

Then they give me a relief pitcher for a closer that hurt himself doing some stupid thing in spring training, and now I had to use this guy Aceves to do the closing. I tried to revive this guy's career by making him the closer and he did OK for about half a season then started to tank.

When the original guy came back, this ungrateful Aceves rips his uniform off and goes crazy. I should have punched him right in the mouth, but instead this crazy radio guy asks me if I checked out and I said I wanted to punch him in the mouth but nobody knew I was kidding.

This has been some miserable year. Rodney Dangerfield must be a silent owner of this team.

Oh, I forgot they already have a couple of those, unless a player asks them for a meeting to get me fired. This is some place, alright.

To tell the truth, I can’t get out of here fast enough. I am so overqualified for this job, it isn’t funny. Ten years of managing in Japan, fluent Japanese, sushi lover, you name it. It all spells overqualified.

In Japan, when I met with the press I had a translator. I should have brought him back here to deal with the Boston media. God knows, I could have used one.

Besides, this place has no sense of humor. None of my coaches got any of my jokes, and I had some good ones. Why? Because they never got close enough to me to hear them. In fact, they weren’t my coaches at all. They were here when I got here.

So this is me: Here today, gone tomorrow. How I can pull off ten years in Japan and less than one in this godforsaken market is beyond me. At least my wife and I won the team dance contest in spring training. It's been all down hill from there.

What’s next for me? I'm going back to the ESPN broadcast for MLB. Oh yeah, that guy Francona has my old job. I should have never taken his.